In March’s blog post, Relevance is key, we discussed the importance of personalised marketing and how it can be used to optimise your campaigns. Know your audience, segment your lists and target them with content relevant to them.

But it’s not as simple as personalising your marketing, pressing send and sitting back to watch the activity roll in. We know that there’s no one magic formula for the perfect campaign. You need to be adaptive, and you need to employ as many methods as possible. At StoneShot we use every little piece of insight available to build more successful campaigns – it all makes a difference.

One of the secrets to email is…

… Timing. Digging into 500,000 fund provider email campaigns one significant variable emerged over and over again – time of day.

Perhaps unsurprisingly 90% of all opens are between 8am-6pm. This trend is shared across all three markets (Central Europe (CE), UK, and US). So, no matter where your audience, don’t expect them to be opening emails in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day, for that matter, as there’s also a noticeable drop in activity during lunch hours.

Is this trend reflected on mobile?

With mobile use in full force, and 72% of UK advisers (71% of US advisors) checking business emails on a mobile phone, adapting your strategy for mobile devices is essential.

Our insight showed mobile open rates to almost fall dead during work hours with an average of 90% of all opens between 9am-5pm on desktop. Outside of these hours, however, the picture is flipped on its head and mobile use hikes up. While this trend is the same across markets, mobile adoption is highest in the US with an average of 45% of all opens on mobile devices, followed by the UK and then CE.

So how can you successfully use this information? By considering the whole picture – engagement is high during the day and dominated by desktop, whereas morning and evening engagement is lower and mobile more prevalent.

You can control when you send your emails but not when they’re opened. So while it’s good manners to send your email during office hours (avoiding lunch), your audience may well open when they’re out of the office and can only view your email on their phone. So you have to make sure that your email displays beautifully on all devices by using clever responsive design.

Analysing data is a bit like going down the rabbit hole – the more you find out, the more questions you have – and of course our analysis doesn’t stop here. We have insights from 20 million emails to share with you and help steer your email marketing strategy. Get in touch at engage@stoneshot.com to find out more.